The Restoration Movement in California

Transcription

1 Pepperdine University From the SelectedWorks of Jerry Rushford April 2, 1984 The Restoration Movement in California Jerry Rushford, Pepperdine University Available at:

2 THE Rl'STORATION MOVEMENT IN CALIFORNJAl Jerry Rushford April 2, 1984 There are really two beginnings to the work in California-1849, the Gold Rush year, is the beginning of the work in Northern California; and twenty years later, 1869, the completion of the railroad marks the beginning in Southern California. Our history out here is a rich tapestry made up of many threads, strands of many weavings, and I am going to try to pull together a variety of these threads. Perhaps nowhere else in the world has our movement had so much diversity, so much uniqueness, so much richness in all the variety of threads that came together as it had here in California. Time does not permit us to give a brief historical background to the various back-to-the-bible movements in the British Isles and in Australia to which we are heir, but those movements played a role in California. We come quickly to North America. August 4, 1794, is the beginning of the James O'Kelly movement. On that day at the old Lebanon church building in Surry County Virginia, O'Kelly and Rice Haggard and many of their friends pulled off from the Methodist church, decided they would be Christians only, go back to the Bible, and launched their Christian church movement which spread through Virginia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Then in 1801 Dr. Abner Jones, a physician-preacher living in Lyndon, Vermont, pulled off from the Baptist church and started a Christian church in his hometown. Two years later he was joined by Elias Smith from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the Smith-Jones movement began to spread until it encompassed all of New England. These two movements-one with roots in the Methodist church, one with roots in the Baptist church-came together in that historic meeting in Philadelphia in 1811, formed a merger and called themselves the Christian Connection because they were both seeking to be Christians only. Meanwhile, on the other side of the mountains on June 28, 1804, Barton and Warren Stone and other preachers in the Presbyterian church were reading the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery at the Cane Ridge Meeting House near Lexington, Kentucky. On that historic day they announced their "Christians only" plea, became Independents and 1 This address was not given from a manuscript and is printed as transcribed from an audiotape with only minor grammatical editing.

3 Jerry Rushford 117 launched a movement that spread first through Kentucky and Ohio. They began with just fifteen churches, eight in Kentucky and seven in Ohio, but in the very next year of 1805, they had penetrated both Tennessee, around Davidson County, and Indiana, around Floyd County. In 1806 three of their families migrated all the way to Arkansas Territory and settled in what is now Randolph County. Arkansas wasn't even a state yet. In 1807 the Stone movement reached Georgia. In 1808 William Barney and his family moved up to Illinois and started the church at Barney's Prairie on the Wabash River just a few miles out of Mount Carmel. The Stone movement which began fairly small exploded in growth. The fourth movement began in August, 1809, at the bottom of Kentucky close to the Tennessee line--an area called the Barrens, particularly Monroe County, Barren County, outside Tompkinsville-when the Mulkey brothers, John and Phillip, renounced their Calvinistic background and began a more independent approach. They were censored that month for heresy, but took with them one half of the Stockton Valley Baptist Association and began a restoration movement in the southern part of the state. There you have four movements that after awhile came to know each other very well-all Christian-only movements. A man who called himself the "White Pilgrim," Joseph Thomas, made a trip in which he touched all four of those movements in ll. When he came out to the west in 1810-ll, he visited Tennessee and came on up through Mulkey country. He did a lot of counting. He talked to people who knew how many members there were. He traveled up to Lexington and consulted with Stone. When he returned home in 18ll, he wrote his book, The Life of the Pilgrim, where he says that there were in the west alone 13,000 members of those movements-13,000 in the west alone! He's not counting O'Kelly. He's not counting Smith-Jones. The movement truly was exploding in 18ll. The fifth movement is the Campbell movement which in 18ll had one little church at Brush Run; one elder, Thomas Campbell; four deacons; and one preacher, Alexander Campbell. They were quite late. Stone beat Campbell into seventeen or eighteen states that I'm aware of. So these other movements were moving quickly, but Campbell caught up in a hurry. If you're wondering why give all of this as a backdrop to California, it's because this is the rich tapestry which makes up our state. It was people from all of these movements who migrated to California. They brought with them all their different cultural backgrounds, whether it was from North Carolina or Kentucky or whether it was from New England or Texas. They also brought with them their various views of scripture. They brought with them their various understandings of the principles of the restoration and unity movement. They settled in California, bringing all that cultural and ecclesiastical baggage with them, but out here in this wild, free state they began to band together, to love each other, to work together, to give each other great freedom of opinion and actually got along

4 118 The Restoration Movement in California together out here for about thirty-five or forty years. It is a remarkable chapter in our history-a part of our heritage that I am proud of and one that could be chronicled in many books. I want to describe some of these threads. The first member of this movement to come to California as far as I know was Arculus Cobler Hawkins who arrived at the head of a wagon train in 1847, two years before the Gold Rush. He was born in Virginia in 1808 and grew up in Orange County. He was from the O'Kelly movement with roots in the Christian Cormection. He moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and became affiliated with the Stone people. He was there New Years Day, 1832, when the Campbell and Stone movements merged. Then he moved out to Ralls County Missouri around Hannibal where the Campbell movement was strong. Finally he came to California. He was a melting pot in and of himself. He was from the O'Kelly movement, the Stone movement, and the Campbell movement. He came out here several times before he moved his family in 1852 and became the leader of the church in Vacaville until his death in The second threads are those twin brothers from New Hampshire, the Smith brothers-william and Joseph-who were from the Smith-Jones movement. They came to California on a ship called the Forest in They came sailing through the Golden Gate in July of that year and settled in a place called the New York of the Pacific at the mouth of the San Joaquin River. Joseph died a few months later, but William lived on, and he found out that more and more people from the Christian Cormection were arriving. He would go to San Francisco and meet fheir boats and invite them to visit New York of the Pacific. He was successful. He persuaded both Deacon Pulcifer and John Pulcifer to visit. They were members of the Christian Church from New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Deacon Pulcifer started a school at New York of the Pacific. Then on that historic day of July 4, 1851, they all came together to name their town. What would they name it? A number of names were suggested, but finally they turned to William Smith, the pioneer. He said, "You know, most of us are from a movement in New England where we just called ourselves Christians, that's all. We're just Christians. We go by the Bible. My brother is buried here. He was just a Christian. I'd like to suggest that we name this town Antioch because in the Bible the followers of Jesus were first called Christians at Antioch." The others agreed and that led to the founding of Antioch, California. So there's our second thread, and that thread is clearly in the Smith-Jones movement. Thread number thre~william Johnston was born about eight miles out of Pittsburgh. I don't have to tell you what movement was strong in that area. Johnston was indebted to the ministry of Thomas and Alexander Campbell. He turned twenty on his trip to California in He settled out here on a little ranch on the Sacramento River below the city of Sacramento. He married Elizabeth Hite whose father was an elder at the First Christian Church in Sacramento for about thirty-five years. The Hites

5 Jerry Rushford 119 were from Ohio. They were most likely affiliated with the Stone movement, but William Johnston was a Campbell man. He built his mansion, called Rosebud Farm, there on the banks of the Sacramento River. This beautiful residence, boasting five marble fire places, is still standing. Johnston became a state -senator, one of the best known people in the Sacramento Valley, and he remained a strong member of the restoration movement until his death in The fourth thread, W. W. Ferguson, was from North Carolina. He was probably a James O'Kelly man, but he married Mary in Indiana, and they came out here to California in They settled in Healdsburg. He served as an elder in the church for forty years at Healdsburg. One of the deacons was Tolbert Fanning, not the famous Tolbert Fanning, but the son of the brother of Tolbert Fanning. His roots were in Tennessee with backgrounds in the Mulkey movement. Finally we come to Thomas Thompson. I know that you've heard that Thompson was our pioneer preacher out here, but there were several here before Thompson. Thompson arrived in California in September, He was born in Kentucky, but preached twenty-five years in Missouri. He was a Baptist who was converted to this movement by Thomas McBride, Joel Hayden, and Samuel Rogers. You know those names-all Stone men--but he came to admire Alexander Campbell, subscribed to the Christian Baptist, and was instrumental in cementing the Stone-Campbell merger in Missouri. He was both a Stone and Campbell man, and when he settled in California, he was the kind of leader that rallied everyone together. He started the State Meeting in Nathan Porter, a sixth thread in our California tapestry, was a Baptist from up in New England who settled in Ohio and became a Campbell man. He was in the Mahonine Baptist Association. He was there the day they dissolved the Mahonine Baptist Association at Austintown in He sent his sons to Bethany College. He came out here and preached his first sermon in 1850 under an oak tree that is still standing at Petaluma. Two brothers from Howard County Missouri-Stone men-milton and James Holsclaw, were the first Protestants to ever set foot in Gilroy, California. When they walked in there on August 2, 1851, they started a church in their home. Dr. James Madison Case who established the church in Santa Rosa in 1850 was a medical man from Tennessee with roots in the Stone movement. There is also the Thomas family who meant so much to the church in Gilroy. They are all buried out there in the Gilroy cemetery-the old pioneer James and his son, Massey, and his son, Thomas Reynolds. They were all from Ohio County Kentucky, and they had roots in the Mulkey movement.

6 120 The Restoration Movement in California W. W. Stevenson, the preacher in Stockton, was from Little Rock, Arkansas, a personal convert of Alexander Campbell and a close friend of Campbell's. Andrew Pierce who gave his name to Pierce Christian College was from Massachusetts where he probably had some association with the Smith-Jones movement. Joshua and Mary Lawson were Mulkey people from Jackson County, Tennessee, who came out here in 1852 and settled in Woodland. Who was the great church leader that they met in Woodland? John N. Pendegast. He was born in South Carolina, raised in Virginia, a member of the O'Kelly movement, graduate of law school, moved to Kentucky, became a close friend of the Mulkey brothers, preached outside of Tompkinsville in the 1830's and 40's, left Kentucky in 1854 and moved to California. There you have Lawson and Pendegast from the Mulkey movement in Woodland, but who was their close friend there? Professor Oscar Mathews, a recent graduate of Bethany College and a Campbell man. He became the founding president of our first college in California, Hesperian College, which they called the "Bethany of the West." J. P. Mccorkle was called the Campbellite preacher, but his roots were in Tennesee before Missouri. Charles Vincent was a German by way of Texas who was a convert of Carroll Kendrick who was from the Mulkey movement. So it goes. I could tell you many others. I share those to show that what we have in California in the early decades is a rich tapestry of people who came not only from the O'Kelly movement, not only from Smith-Jones, not only from Stone, not only from the Mulkeys, not only from Campbell, but Glenn Burnett and A. V. McCarty came from Oregon. They were already out here. John Hay and W. J. A. Smith, the great leaders in Los Angeles, were from England. 1n fact, Hay was a former Presbyterian from Princeton. Great leaders like J. W. Webb and Henry Earl and H. C. Lyle were from Australia. That great physician-preacher in the church at Colusa, Dr. Thomas Porter, was a witty Irishman. Oh, the tapestry that we have! They came from everywhere-from New York and Texas, from the Carolinas and from Missouri. You talk about the Civil War. Didn't seem to bother the people out here. They were from both sides. Michael Sanders who fought for the North and was wounded at Vicksburg was a very conservative man who you might have thought was from the South. James Monroe who fought with James Garfield was a northern man who lost a, foot in battle. He came out here and preached for many years. But T. B. Larimore who held so many great meetings in California fought for the South. Thomas Jefferson McQuiddy who was an elder over at Hanford and ran for Governor of California and whose family still owns the Gospel Advocate in Nashville to this day fought for the South. Nathaniel Vise who was the founder of Visalia, California, and gave his name to the town fought for the South, but W. A. Gardner who meant so much to the State

7 Jerry Rushford 121 Board and the Missionary Society in the northern part of the state was from the northern side. He was a Michigan man. On it went, a rich tapestry all getting along pretty well together out here in this state. Now the annual State Meeting which meant so much to unity in California was begun by Thomas Thompson. It started in There were thirty-five of them before they ended in They were succeeded by the Tabernacle that was erected in Santa Cruz, which was the home of the Missionary Society from 1890 on. The State Meetings in those thirty-five years were not yet conventions with delegates. They were great revival meetings with great preaching and great food, and the young Christians meeting each other-christian girls meeting Christian boys-and marriages being arranged. They were quite a social phenomenon. When they started in 1855, they were quite small, but the next year in 1856 A. C. Hawkins hosted the State Meeting on his farm in Vacaville. He slaughtered the cattle for the meeting. He fed everybody. They met in a school house and that was the beginning of the State Meeting as an encampment, a great family gathering. It got bigger each year. In 1860 when they held it on the banks of Mark West Creek six miles northwest of Santa Rosa, there were 5,000 people there on Lord's Day morning. We didn't have anywhere near 5,000 members in Northern California. That shows you what kind of phenomenon it was. The whole town came out. The community came out. The State Meetings lasted for ten days. They began on a Friday. They ended on a Sunda_y ten days later. During the course of the State Meeting, it was not uncommon for over one hundred people to be baptized into Christ. One hundred twenty were baptized in 1860 at that meeting at Santa Rosa including Linsey Carson, the brother of Kit Carson, the famous scout. Linsey Carson became a famous businessman in Lakeport, an elder in the church, and a member of the Board of Trustees of our Christian college in Santa Rosa. In when the State Meeting was held at Santa Rosa again, they had 7,000. This was in the middle of the Civil War. Seven thousand people on Lord's Day morning to hear J. P. Mccorkle preach. That year they baptized 140. When you look at where the State Meetings were, it gives you some demographic insight into where our people were spreading in California. Five valleys jump out. The Sacramento Valley was an early location for our people all the way from Colusa down to Woodland and on down into Vacaville. Woodland became the strongest church, the Jerusalem of the north. Many churches were in the San Joaquin Valley all the way from Stockton, which is mistakenly sometimes called the first church, all the way down through Modesto and into Visalia. The Santa Clara Valley, which was Santa Clara, San Jose, Gilroy, Santa Cruz, was Thomas Thompson country. The fourth and fifth valleys were side by side. The Napa Valley, which was J. P. Mccorkle country, was Yountville and Napa. The Sonoma Valley was basically Healdsburg and Santa Rosa. Those were the five valleys in which our people spread in Northern California.

8 122 The Restoration Movement in California We had churches in San Francisco and Oakland, but they were not strong. We had churches in Contra Costa County-Antioch we've mentioned and Clayton and Danville-but they weren't very big. It was basically those valleys. When you look at the State Meetings, six of them were held in Woodland; six of them in the Napa Valley; five, in Santa Rosa; and five down in the Santa Clara area around San Jose. That gives it away where the strength was. I want to share with you an editorial that appeared in 1865, the year the Civil War ended, in the Baltimore American, a fine newspaper on the Atlantic seacoast, under the title, "The Disciples of Christ." This editorial was not written by a member of the Restoration Movement, but notice how accurate it is in several areas. The Disciples of Christ--The growth of this body of Christians, sometimes called Campbellites, is unparalled in the annals of religious history. They had their origin in this country only about forty years ago, but they number now, in the United States alone, over six hundred thousand communicants, while they are growing rapidly in Great Britain, the Canadas, the West Indies, and Australia. As a denomination, they have always been devoted to the interests of education, and the diffusion of general intelligence. They have now under their control, thirteen first-class Colleges, and in addition, a large number of Acade mies and higher Seminaries of learning. They now publish a quarterly, four weekly, and eleven monthly papers, besides innumerable tracts, pamphlets and miscellaneous matter. Their statistics show that they have 4,200 preachers in the field in this country, many of whom are men of high intellectual culture and talent. Their great strength lies in the "Valley of the Mississippi," the State of Kentucky alone having 130,000 persons belonging to that church. They claim no creed but the Bible, and to call Bible things by Bible names. They contend that that they occupy the ground held by the primitive Christians, [There's the restoration theme], and teach that all professing Christianity should unite upon the word of God. [There's the unity theme. This man has done his homework.] However much in error their doctrinal tenets may be regarded by their religious friends, the facts cannot be disguised, that during the past thirty or forty years, they have made more rapid progress than any other denomination in the United States. I share that only to say that there are several things in there that I find very interesting because they relate to California. Number 1 and number 2-Everywhere this movement has gone about the first two things to pop up are periodicals and colleges. Over 1,500 periodicals and 500 colleges

9 Jerry Rushford 123 are a lot. That's a lot in any movement. Out here in California that characterized our people from the very beginning. At the State Meeting in 1858, they said, "We need a paper." They wisely chose W. W. Stevenson, a brilliant literary man, to be the editor. He edited that monthly paper that was called The Western Evangelist for about five years until He might have edited it a lot longer except that his wife did not come with him when he moved from Little Rock, Arkansas, and he made the mistake of marrying again five years later without having dissolved that first marriage. That caused quite a bit of consternation in the camp, and he was disfellowshiped by the church in San Francisco and at the State Meeting in 1863, they said, "Maybe the associate editor, J. N. Pendegast, ought to take the paper." I'm sure Stevenson was heart broken, and it was probably a loss in a literary way because he was a brilliant man. So J. N. Pendegast became our second editor. He changed the name from The Western Evangelist to The Christian Teacher. He put The Christian Teacher out for three years-1864, 65 and 66. I'm happy to tell you that all of 1865 and 66 are still extant. I have a xerox of those two years and have practically memorized them. They are a gold mine of information. At the end of those three, many church leaders thought it was time for a weekly paper in California. That was a terrible mistake. Is that a California malady of dreaming too big? But they thought they had enough money to support it and that was a disappointment to Pendegast. He wanted to keep editing it, but they got those two young graduates from Eureka College, J. W. Craycroft and S. K. Hallam, to edit a new paper called The Pacific Gospel Herald. It was a weekly, and it lasted four years (}-but they lost a lot of money on it. They gave it over to Alexander Johnston from Indiana, and he published a monthly paper called The Bible Expositor from 1871 to It only lasted four years, but it was an excellent paper, and all of 1871 is still extant. I think I've got that one about memorized,. too. In Johnston gave the paper up. It was turned over to Glenn Burnett. Burnett moved it up to Colusa and changed the name to The California Christian. I can't tell when he ended that paper, but it seems to have gone on into the 1890's. Following him, a paper was started called The Pacific Church News by James McCullough. That became The Christian Church News under E. B. Ware. A proliferation of periodicals occurred. In the 1890's they just seemed to pop up everywhere. Colleges-do you know that our people started six colleges in California before 1900? The first one was so historic to them that they insisted on enrolling the students on March 4, 1861, because that was the day Abraham Lincoln was being sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States, and they wanted people to remember that on that day Hesperian College started in Woodland. That college that started in 1861,

10 124 The Restoration Movement in California even though the building wasn't ready, survived until 1897-thirty-six years. It was the Bethany of the West, our finest college in California. College number 2 was started in that rival city of Santa Rosa. I wish I had time to share with you the rivalry between Woodland and Santa Rosa as reflected in the church papers. It's funny, and a little sad at times, mostly funny, with Santa Rosa bragging about how much better their water was and things like that and why students ought to go to their school instead of Woodland because they had only had four funerals in Santa Rosa in the last year-what a healthy town it was. Santa Rosa started the second college. It was called Christian College which is a frustration to historians. Why didn't they name it Santa Rosa Christian College or something Christian College, but it's just called Christian College which causes all kinds of confusion. It started in 1872 and lasted until about One of the students at that school, a young man who was studying to enter the ministry and he did do some preaching, was Charles Edwin Markham who became the most famous poet in America from about 1900 on. His poem, "The Man With the Hoe," published in 1899 secured his fame. Markham didn't preach for our churches after that. He went on to become a poet and a school teacher. The third college was the one that Andrew Pierce gave his fortune to, Pierce Christian College, For twenty years it was a fine college, but it was very close geographically to Hesperian. They were rivals for the same students. The fourth college was Florence College in Hollister. Johnston started that one. It only lasted about two years. Alexander The fifth college was right down here in the southland over at Downey. James Monroe started Southern Pacific College, It burned down after two or three years and was never rebuilt. The last college was Washington College which was a gift to us. It had already been in existence eleven years when our brethren were given the privilege of running it in We held on until about 1895 and then it became a girls' school and then it burned at the end of the l890's. None of those six colleges made it past 1900, but they were good beginnings, good efforts. They weren't real first class colleges. They were academies. They never had more than a couple of hundred students, but they did a lot for the progress of the cause. Now, a third thing that I see in that article is that everywhere our people have gone, they have been interested in statistics. Did you catch that figure about 600,000 communicants? I think that's a little high for 1865, but Ben Franklin probably would have agreed with it. He may have been the one that sent it to Baltimore. I think we were probably a little lower at that point, but out here in California our people started gathering

11 Jerry Rushford 125 statistics pretty quickly. We hadn't even been out here ten years when they came together at the State Meeting in 1857 and counted members and came up with twenty-three churches. The amazing thing is they left off five. They didn't count Franklin where William Johnston was. They missed San Francisco with Charles Vincent, Brown's Valley with Nathan Porter, Snelling with Daniel Mcswain, and Manzanita with Joseph P. Rose. So we had at least twenty-eight churches by That's after just eight years. Two years later they gathered statistics again. This time they came up with twenty-seven churches, but they missed eleven others. We had thirty-eight churches that I can come up with by By the end of the first decade, thirty-eight churches and nearing two thousand members. We had sixty churches by the time 1870 rolled around. The movement continued to expand, and when you get up to the division between the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ at the turn of the century, you have some stunning statistics. In John Brown's book Churches of Christ, the statistic given for the State of California is this-a total of one hundred forty six churches with about twenty thousand members. That's pretty explosive growth. How many did the Churches of Christ have in 1904? Well, E. N. Glenn had just arrived here from Nashville, and he wrote a letter back to David Lipscomb. He could only come up with sixteen churches and probably five or six hundred members at most. If you take those sixteen away from the one hundred forty six, which I assume Brown is including since that was before the official division, what you have in the breakdown of 1904 is about one hundred thirty churches on one side and about sixteen on the other. That's an interesting statistic right there. Now a word about preachers. The fourth thing that I get out of that editorial is that we have always been a preacher-centered fellowship, and we were in California. Did you catch that 4,200 preachers? I have been able to count over twenty preachers in California in the first decade alone-maybe thirty-and they continue to grow. If you read all the letters to the Millennial Harbinger from California, they are always crying over the fact that we don't have any preachers out here. You have got to discount some of that. We had some good ones out here, and they were indefatigable. They travelled all the time, and they held great meetings. There were great meetings all over California. This was typical of our growth. W. W. Stevenson's meeting at Santa Clara in 1852 was the first one. Twenty-seven were added. John 0. White went into Big Plains in 1857 and sixty were added. J. P. Mccorkle preaching in the State Meeting of 1860 had 120 additions. In 1864, 140 were baptized at the State Meeting. J. W. Lowe held a meeting at San Jose in 1870 and had 90 additions. E. B. Ware preached in a meeting in Hanford in 1890 and there were 17 8 additions, including 125 baptisms. T. B. Larimore pitched a tent in Los Angeles in 1895 and preached from January 3 to April 17 twice every day and three times on Sunday, fifteen sermons a week for three and a half

12 126 The Restoration Movement in California months, with 120 baptized. The most successful California meeting in the early twentieth century was with the illustrious Harvey Breeden. Breeden was a brilliant evangelist who was the pastor at First Christian Church in Fresno for so many years. He came into Fresno, First Christian Church, in 1909 and held a meeting that resulted in 226 additions. No wonder they called him back three years later to take over that church. They probably went into a lull after that and in 1912 had to bring him back to keep those 226 strong. It wasn't all preachers. There were businessmen. I've mentioned A. C. Hawkins, and if you go up into Northern California, the Howell Davis mansion is still there at Sycamore. He was a great businessman and an elder in the church. There were also politicians. I'm amazed! The first governor of the State of California was Peter Burnett who had roots in the Restoration Movement although he left the movement. There was William Worth Pendegast, J. N. Pendegast's son who became a state senator, and William Johnston who became a state senator, and T. J. McQuiddy who ran for governor, and all the people who were in the state legislature. Thomas R. Reynolds was in the legislature and Hershel Johnson, John T. Johnson's son. I can think of ten or twelve just in those early decades who were prominent people in the world of politics. Now I want to tell you about the developments in the early days that I think will say something about where we are today. The first issue I will mention is the relationship to other churches-what was it like in the nineteenth century? What did our movement think of other churches? Well, probably on one side are things like this. Everytime he would hold meetings in different towns Pendegast would say in his paper, "We're so grateful to our Methodist and Presbyterian friends for letting us use their building." It was very polite. They let us use their building. You even find a situation like Clayton, California, where the Methodists and Disciples went in together and built a church building. That doesn't happen very often, but it happened in Clayton. That building is still standing, and it is now the city center in Clayton and one of the oldest buildings in that county, and they are quite proud of it. Then you have situations where all of these other groups would come out to the State Meeting and that was fraternal. Do you remember the American Bible Union, the ABU which was putting out the new translation of the Bible? They were very involved in California and that brought the Baptists and the Restoration Movement together on fraternal terms. However, it wasn't always as fraternal. I keep thinking of E. B. Ware's statement. He was proud of the church in San Jose because his parents were members there, and he has this unforgettable line, "they were Disciples with red blood in their veins; they would not be absorbed by the

13 Jerry Rushford 127 denominations." That is probably a little more typical of where our movement was in the nineteenth century. He goes on to describe the great meeting by Lowe in which ninety were added to the church, sixty were baptized from the world, and thirty came over "from the denominations," and he concludes that, "It was a glorious meeting." This little letter from J. W. Craycroft probably says more than I could say in a longer statement. Craycroft was a great evangelist in California, and he wrote a letter for publication in The Christian Teacher, August, 1865, in which he is so proud of the city of Milpitas. It was a great city and he had been preaching there, and he says, As a general thing, its citizens are composed of the best people I have met on this tour, with this exception; not many of them are members of the church of Christ. They have a good Sunday School, but no Church organization. Some of our religious neighbors have been talking of organizing a Church, and calling it after, or naming it for John the immerser. We tried to show them that John was dead before the Church of Christ was established. That the scrcalled Baptist Church did not exist for many years after the Church of Christ was founded. Therefore it must be human, and not divine. We also tried to show them the proprieties of coming back to Apostolic practice; for admission into the Kingdom; faith to purify the heart; repentance to change the life, and baptism to change the relation. Then taking the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice. That they should be willing to be called by Bible names, Christians, Disciples of Christ, etc.-such names as we found in the Holy Oracles. A second issue involved the authority of elders in the local church. It's interesting how history repeats itself. Thomas Thompson took the position that elders are not rulers. They cannot execute the laws of the church. Thompson argued that the congregation has to do it, but Glenn Burnett disagreed. Burnett said, "No, the elders are rulers." He was backed up by Pendegast, so gradually Thompson lost that one. That all grew out of the fact that Thompson's feelings were hurt because Stevenson was disfellowshiped by the elders of the church in San Francisco for marrying that second wife. That debate over elders went back and forth for a couple of years, but it did not result in division. A third issue was the Sunday School movement. The Sunday School movement never seems to have been a problem out here. There were no Sunday Schools here in By 1872 half of the churches had them because of the work of Hiram Connell, and by 1880 as far as I can see, they all had them with one or two exceptions. It never seems to have caused a ripple at all. The located preacher movement might have been a fourth issue.

14 128 The Restoration Movement in California That caused a lot of problems in other states, but none in California. The most conservative man we had out here theologically was Charles Vincent in San Francisco, a very wealthy businessman. It was his money that sent J. N. Pendegast back to the mid-west to find a couple of good located preachers to bring back to California for San Francisco and Oakland. Pendegast came back with that old church builder himself, Thomas P. Haley, and J. C. Keith. Haley went to San Francisco and Keith went to Oakland. There was no problem with located preachers in California, even the most conservative of people were supporting them and asking them to come in. There was the temperance movement. Again, no problem there. Some of the members of the church were really involved in the temperance movement. In fact James Webb was one of the founders of a Temperance Colony known today as Lompoc, California. Webb ran for governor on the Prohibition ticket. He got beat, but he ran. A lot of people were involved in that temperance movement, but not everybody, and it didn't split the church. The women's movement. There was a little movement around 1876 to 1880 of people wanting to suggest that we have women preachers in the churches. The men supporting it were W. W. Stevenson and Glenn Burnett. They were both quite liberal theologically, but the people opposing it were J. N. Pendegast, James Anderson, J. P. Mccorkle and L. B. Wilkes. That one sort of faded out in the 1880's, and it doesn't seem to have caused any division or ripple. So the issues that we come down to that really began to bother and trouble the church were the Missionary Society, which came in at the Sacramento State Meeting in 1880 and became a reality by 1890 with the building of the Tabernacle at Santa Cruz, and in the 1890's the instrumental music question. In Southern California the State Meeting began in It evolved into the Missionary Society in So if you're looking for a date, if you can only decide on one date and you have to drive home one peg, probably the key date is 1890 because that is the beginning of the Southern Christian Missionary Society founded here in the southland and that's the year the Tabernacle was completed in Santa Cruz. There's no evidence after 1890 that the conservatives, the Churches of Christ, were supporting either the Tabernacle in Santa Cruz or the Missionary Society. Yet the interesting thing is they hadn't split into separate churches yet. They weren't supporting those missionary societies, but they were all still in the same congregations because the musical instrument question was discussed all through the 1890's, and it was in the 1890's that the conservatives gradually began pulling off and starting house churches and small congregations. So probably in 1900 and definitely by 1904, you have E. N. Glenn saying that the conservatives in the state were down to only about sixteen churches.

15 Jerry Rushford 129 One of the interesting problems to me is the beginning of the Berkeley Bible Seminary. It started in 1896 and it started under tremendous tension because there were two different mindsets at work in the Berkeley Bible Seminary, but one of the mindsets was not the Churches of Christ non-instrumentalists. They had for all practical purposes gone their separate way, and they were not even a part of the debate. So what was the debate about? It seems to me that the two mindsets that you have in evidence after 1927, after the North American Christian Convention, the Independents and the Disciples, are in evidence in California a full thirty years earlier. In 1896 when they were trying to raise the money for Berkeley Bible Seminary, the only way they could get the money from the conservatives was to promise them that when they opened this seminary, they would announce that Dr. David R. Dungan, a conservative champion from Drake, would be the Dean of the school. But when the money was raised and they got ready to make the announcement, there were too many others who said, "We don't like Dungan." Dungan was a conservative like McGarvey and there were enough out here in the state that weren't comfortable with that direction and so there was quite a debate, much more than I have had a chance to get into in this research. I think somebody could write a Master's thesis on the whole Berkeley Bible Seminary experience and how finally out of all that turmoil they chose Dr. S. M. Jefferson from Bethany. When Jefferson came, the conservatives were hurt. By conservatives I'm not talking about the Churches of Christ non-instrumental. I'm really talking about the independent kind of mindset that becomes manifest nationally a quarter century later. In Berkeley the University Christian Church is the one that becomes famous for open membership so that in 1914 in California you have the specter of the General Convention in Northern California refusing to allow the delegates of the University Christian Church of Berkeley to be seated at the Convention that year because they practiced open membership. That had never happened anywhere in America. It shows you something of how strong the independent mindset was in Northern California in 1914, and it shows you how some of these tensions that were affecting other parts of the country began to be felt in California gradually. The case study that probably will bring it into focus is to be found in Los Angeles. As you turn the century and start into the twentieth century, you could take three men and describe where we are today. For the Disciples that remarkable church builder, Alexander Campbell Smither, who came to the state in For the moderates, the Independents, you could take Benjamin Franklin Coulter who came out of Clarksville, Tennessee, and built the Coulter Department Stores, the biggest one in Los Angeles which became Broadways over there on the Miracle Mile. Coulter was an indefatigable laborer, just going everywhere building churches and so on. He was very opposed to the Missionary Societies, a very moderate man, but pretty much was a missionary society in and of himself. He just went everywhere starting churches. For the Churches of Christ non-instrumental, right there in that same church with Smither and with

16 130 The Restoration Movement in California Coulter was Michael Sanders, a wealthy businessman, an elder in the church. You could go back to 1894 and in the old Temple Street Church in Los Angeles you could take a look at those three men, wonderful men, great brothers in the Lord, and talented men, and you could really see in microcosm the next eighty years of the twentieth century. A. C. Smither went on to build the First Christian Church at Hope and Eleventh. Out of that group Coulter went on to build the Broadway Church of Christ at Broadway and Temple, and Michael Sanders got on the train, went back to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1900, consulted with James Harding and David Lipscomb, and said, "Send some preachers to California," and here they came. It's what one historian has called the "Gospel Train from Nashville." Out came all those Nashville preachers that built the twentieth century Churches of Christ non-instrumental. In Los Angeles itself you see the case study. Now in the twentieth century, closing with these demographics and statistics, the largest church in the nineteenth century in this area was Downey and in the north was Woodland, but after a while as you turn into the twentieth century, the largest church became the great Central Christian Church in San Diego under the ministry of a remarkable man, William Edgar Crabtree, a College of the Bible graduate, Lexington, Kentucky, who moved out here in 1895 and gave thirty-five years to the building of that church in San Diego. They had 1362 members. It was the largest congregation from the Campbell-Stone movement anywhere on the Pacific Slope. In Northern California Dr. Harvey Breeden built that great First Christian Church at Fresno to over 900 members. Those were the two large churches. In the Churches of Christ, non-instrumental, the largest church in the north was a little tiny church in Forestville, ten miles west of Santa Rosa in the Russian River Valley, a congregation of about one hundred. In Los Angeles the largest church was the Sichel Street church which had about one hundred where G. W. Riggs was preaching. As you come into the twentieth century, other developments are the beginnings of Pacific Christian College in Long Beach in 1928, San Jose Bible College in That wonderful Charles Chapman, the orange king of the world, lends his name to Chapman College which begins in 1920 under a different name and becomes California Christian College and Chapman College in That Kansas farm boy who founds the Western Auto Company, George Pepperdine, founds George Pepperdine College in Into the area of benevolence, California Christian Home starts in Long Beach in The Children's Home in Chino that is today called Hillview Acres begins in Ontario in George Taubman comes to Long Beach and builds the largest men's Sunday School that anybody had ever seen in America. There have been some exciting twentieth century developments in

17 Jerry Rushford 131 the area of m1ss10ns. For the first time in the twentieth century, our people began to concentrate on the Orientals and on the Hispanics and on the Blacks. They began to move out quickly into various areas of California where the Restoration Movement had not yet been planted. As you look at the Churches of Christ in the twentieth century, starting with sixteen that E. N. Glenn came up with in 1904, they go something like this. In 1906, twenty-three churches; 1909, thirty; 1916, thirty-five; 1926, sixty-eight; 1932, seventy-eight; 1935, ninety-four; 1938, one hundred eighteen; 1942, one hundred fifty-two; and 1957, three hundred sixty-seven. In the latest statistics put together by Dr. Mac Lynn at the Harding Graduate School in Memphis, Tennessee, 1982, there are seven hundred churches with about 70,000 members and 88,000 adherents. That is somewhat deceiving. That is not a very unified seven hundred. About four hundred eighty of those are mainstream churches that are the kind that support Pepperdine University or the Herald of Truth television show. There are about one hundred thirty of those that are what are called the non-cooperation group that do not prefer the sponsored church concept. There's another fifty churches in there that are the one cup churches that do not prefer multiple cups in the communion. There's another twenty-five that are the non-sunday School churches. It's quite a splintering after you get by that original four hundred eighty. The Disciples of Christ and the Independents have their first separate statistics in 1971 when the Americah Year Book of Churches lists them separately. Interestingly in 1971 all three movements are about the same. It's interesting to see those statistics. Churches of Christ with a few more members, but the Disciples with more adherents, and the Independents very close in churches and members. Time does not permit us to go further. I want to give one last development that was not a California development, but in 1941 as already has been mentioned, that saintly man Claude Spencer started the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, and we would not be here today without that kind of vision. He was a remarkable man, and many people in this room have been the recipients of his friendship and his help, myself included. No one in the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s would dare to write a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation in Restoration History without consulting with Claude Spencer, or at least they were foolish if they did. We thank him for that and for what the Historical Society means to us in calling us together in this lecture forum. And certainly what a thrill it is to share in the memory of Forrest Reed and to actually be in the very auditorium with Mrs. Reed and to be a part of this great Reed Lectureship. I hope these few comments I've given as rapidly as I have will help to form some kind of backdrop now for the exciting lectures that are to come from Dr. Harrison and Dr. Keene as we probe this wonderful heritage in which we share. Thank you for inviting me.